Spanish PM Pedro Sanchez says he asked the country's prosecutor office to investigate X, TikTok, and Meta over the alleged “creation and dissemination” of CSAM
Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez said he is using special public-interest powers to ask the country's prosecutor office …
Context & Ripple Effects
Spain has already shown a willingness to use exceptional regulatory tools against large platforms: its data-protection authority previously used emergency GDPR powers to halt Meta election features in the country, a precedent for rapid intervention over platform risks.
This referral also lands alongside EU-level scrutiny of platform safeguards, including a DSA child-protection investigation into TikTok and an earlier DSA inquiry into X over illegal-content risks. Spain’s move adds a domestic criminal-law channel to an enforcement environment already focused on platform accountability.
First-order effects
- X, TikTok and Meta face a prosecutor-led assessment of allegations concerning the creation and dissemination of CSAM, raising immediate demands for records, explanations and cooperation.
- The referral puts child-safety controls and content-handling practices at the center of scrutiny for all three services in Spain, without itself establishing wrongdoing.
Second-order effects
- The companies may need to coordinate Spanish legal responses with existing EU compliance work, particularly where moderation, reporting and risk-management evidence overlaps with DSA obligations.
- A national prosecutorial route increases pressure on peer platforms to ensure that child-safety procedures can withstand both regulator and criminal-law scrutiny, rather than treating the issue solely as a trust-and-safety policy matter.
Third-order effects
- If national authorities increasingly combine domestic powers with EU platform rules, large services will face a more layered enforcement model: EU-wide obligations assessed through country-specific investigations and remedies.
- That structure could make safety governance a more consequential differentiator among platforms, though the practical effect will depend on what prosecutors find and how any case proceeds.
The trend: European platform oversight is moving toward overlapping national and EU enforcement channels for high-harm content and systemic safety failures.